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HOBBES represents a compromise between two factions: rejects the theory of the divine rights of kings  and also rejects the eary democratic view , taken up by the Parliamentarians, that power outht to be shared between Parliament and king. He argues radically for his times, that political authority and obligation are based on the individual self-interests of members of society who are understood to be equal to one another, with no single individual invested with any essential authority to rule over the rest, while at the same time maintaining the conservative position that the monarch, wich called the Sovereign, must be ceded absolute authority if society is to survive.Hobbe’s political theories were:The theory of human motivation and psychological egoism and the Theory of the socil contract founded on the hypotetical State of Nature. Thomas Hobbes theoreticized about a situation previous to any kind of society, which, in his books “Leviathan”(whose psychological theory was therefore informed by mechanism) and “The Cive”, calls state of nature. According to Thomas Hobbes,in the state of nature, humans are more or less equal, since even the strongest individual can be killed while sleeping. However, this state of nature would be an absolute nightmare, a state of constant war of all against all, in which life is solitary, nasty, poor, short and brutish for humans. This is mainly caused by three factors:The first factor is the scarcity of resources. As the amount of food, water and any resources in general would be limited, because techniques like agriculture and animal breeding couldn’t have been discovered without a society. With the amount of resources being limited,is logical to think that humans would fight in a war of all against all in order to get the greater amount of resources which would increase their chances of survival.



The second reason is, according to Hobbes, the inherent selfish and rational nature of humans; which means that they’d only care about their own wellbeing, about achieving their own desires and will use their reason for doing so. Combining this with the scarcity of resources, we get that a human would only care about his or her well-being and, therefore, quarrel with other people on resources. The third factor is diffidence, or lack of confidence. Due to the constant threat of being attacked in order to get resources, there’d be no trust between humans, which would increase the tension, and therefore, the risk of quarreling even more, but more importantly makes cooperation, or teamwork impossible since everyone would fear their teammates may be planning to backstab them at any moment. It’s not that they would be constantly fighting each other, but rather that they are constantly under the threat  of being attacked, something like the Cold War between Russia and the USA.  Hobbes considers the state of nature as “the worst possible situation in which men can find themselves” and thanks to the rational nature of humans, they’d like to abandon the state of nature as soon as possible. This is what Hobbes calls “laws of nature”, which say that humans tend to reach peace and will sacrifice some of their freedoms and rights in order to achieve this peace if other humans compromise to do the same. That’s why humans, in order to abandon the State of Nature in order to reach peace, renounce to some of their rights and freedoms and start to live in society under a series of common laws, through a social contract, or covenant, promising not to attack other members of the society.  However, one of the causes of quarreling in the state of nature was the lack of confidence between humans. This means that humans cannot be sure if the rest of people will accept the social contract. 



That’s why Hobbes considers that it is necessary to employ political power to force people into not breaking the covenant. This political force would be in the form of a sovereign, a person that would create laws and punishments for breaking those laws. Punishments  are a way of ensuring that people respect the covenant for their own sake, that is, for selfishness. Therefore, in Hobbes’ theory, the sovereign is the person who glues society together so it doesn’t fall apart. However, there is another problem with this: the self-interested nature of humans. The sovereign doesn’t get anything in return for keeping society stable, and being the sovereign would be burdensome for a human. As humans inherently aspire for wellbeing and power, the sovereign must be given absolute power as a compensation for the burden of being the person who holds society together if society is to survive. That’s why Hobbes’s theory about the state of nature was quite controversial, because it was understood as an advocation for absolutism, as Hobbes concluded that there was no reason for opposing the sovereign’s actions, because he’s the only barrier that exists between society and the state of nature. 

ROUSSEAU: Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered the state of nature, that is, the situation in which humans lived before societies came into existence, as a sort of paradise, in which humans lived peaceful, uncomplicated lives. For Rousseau the invention of private property constitutes humanity’s fall from grace out of the State of nature. Rousseau considers the transition to society a regression rather than a progression. According to Rousseau, in the state of nature, there was no scarcity of resources because the population was smaller and nature provided humans with everything they needed, so there wasn’t reason for quarreling. Humans didn’t have whims to compete for, either



 , since they couldn’t wish what they didn’t know (they wouldn’t desire something because they didn’t know what it was). In fact, humans wouldn’t want to fight among them because, according to Rousseau, they have a natural feeling of pity, or empathy towards other humans. This feeling of empathy came from the equality of all humans in the state of nature. Rousseau argued that the natural inequalities, like strength, or intelligence tended to balance themselves (stronger people would be less intelligent and vice-versa), so all humans were basically equal.  As all humans were empathetic toward other humans, they had an egotistical reason to help each other, because seeing other humans suffer would make them suffer as well. That’s why, as time passed and population began to grow, humans started to form small collaborative groups, like families. This means that for Rousseau, the state of nature is a paradise, much better than society. However, if that’s so, why did humans abandon it to form societies? According to Rousseau, the answer to that question is private property. In Rousseau’s state of nature, there was no scarcity of resources, so the creation of private property wasn’t an answer to combat starvation, but rather a random event that after many many years of state of nature ended up happening by chance, by pure probability.The moment in which a human enclosed a piece of land and claimed it theirs and other people imitated him or her and started claiming pieces or land, animals, objects… in general, resources or sources of resources as theirs was the moment in which feelings like envy, greed, and competition, and started to arise because of the concept of “possessing”, which didn’t exist in Rousseau’s perfect state of nature. The concept of possession leads humans to value themselves by comparing their situation, their goods, to another person’s. If one person owns more 



property than another, the second person will consider themselves inferior to the first one,  which may cause the second to attack the first out of jealousy, something that couldn’t happen in the state of nature because nobody had anything.RUSSEAU 2: Private property unavoidably leads to the creation of society, because once private property has expanded enough, all sources of resources have a proprietor, and in order to get some of those resources, it is necessary to establish a relationship with that proprietor. That’s what society is for Rousseau, a net of relations  of dependence. Once private property is introduced, some own the properties, and others work for the owners, which gives birth to social classes and therefore, to inequality. This concept of inequality and social classes, is according to Rousseau, the source of most conflict and fights in modern society, since in society, we tend to value ourselves by comparing ourselves to other people, which causes envy, which can easily trigger fighting. Also, poorer people may have to steal from the richer people in order to survive, something which is also a source of conflict, something that didn’t happen in Rousseau’s state of nature since everyone had their basic needs satisfied. According to Rousseau, the higher classes would create a government and laws which protects their private property from the lower classes. In order to get the lower classes to accept this government, a social contract, which pretends to guarantee equality for everyone, is proposed, but in reality its objective is to protect private property, and therefore perpetuate the inequalities among humans. When people accept this contract, they are losing what Rousseau considers humans’ natural blessings: sympathy, freedom…, and submit themselves to the powerful ones. There were two distinct social contract theories: The first is found in his essay,



Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality among men, commonly referred to as the second discourse and is an account of the moral and political evolucion of human beings over time, from a State of nature to modern society. The second is his normative, or idealized theory of the social contract and is meant to provide the means by wich to alleviate the problems that modern society has created for us, as laid out in the Second Discourse.The normative social contract, argued by Rousseau in the Social Contract is meant to respond to this sorry state of affairs and to remedy the social and moral ills that have been produced by the development society.(“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains”) COMPARATION: For Hobbes, human nature is naturally competitive and violent; while Rousseau thinks that man lives in harmony with nature. Both Hobbes and Rousseau grant about the same powers of sovereignty. There exists however a fundamental difference between them on the issue of sovereignty. Whereas Rousseau separates the sovereign from the government, Hobbes does not. Rousseau insists that sovereignty always resides with the people as a whole and government is only legitimate, that is, only exerts power legitimately, to the extent that it is the agent of the people as they express themselves through the general will. Hobbes, on the other hand, associates sovereignty with government itself and wants to make government as absolute and powerful as possible. Underlying this basic difference is Rousseau’s insistence that civil society must be based upon preservation of everyone’s freedom and equality in contrast with Hobbes’: insistence that civil society must be based upon power and fear. On an even deeper level, their opposition results from differing conceptions of human nature: Rousseau’s basic trust in human beings and his desire for their



possessing freedom of expression in contrast with Hobbes’ declaration that human beings are so aggressive and power-seeking that an overwhelming power must exist to keep them in check, if we want to live in peace. For Hobbes, avoiding a state of civil war, the worst possible catastrophe, is always the foremost goal; for Rousseau, the preservation of human freedom and equality, without which we cannot maintain our humanity, is the foremost goal. As we might expect then, there is considerable difference between them as to what subjects should be willing to “put up with” from their government. We can also see why European heads of state shuddered at the thought of The Social Contract.  Rousseau would reject the coercive element associated with Hobbes’ view of the social contract. Hobbes stresses the point that subjects enter into the commonwealth out of a sense of fear, so much so that it makes no difference in our obligations to the sovereign whether we entered through a voluntary assembly or through the fact of being conquered. Rousseau, on the other hand, asserts that our obedience to a conqueror should last only until the time we can escape from or overcome the usurper’s power. Moreover, Rousseau thinks that, in entering the social contract from a state of nature, we exchange elements of natural freedom for civil and moral freedom; and we cannot assign this worthwhile exchange simply to the motivation of fear. Hobbes and Rousseau differ in their ideas on the state of nature, Hobbes has a negative view(Hobbes theory of social contract supports sovereign without giving any value to individuals), while Rousseau believes we were better off in the state of nature(Rousseau supports individuals more than the state or the government) The basis for their different ideas on the state of nature contribute to their diverging ideas on their accounts of government



by social contract. “Hobbes saw societies divided by war and offered a road to peace. Rousseau saw societies divided by inequality and prophesied their downfall.” If we want to live together peacefully, Hobbes argued, we must submit ourselves to an authoritative body with the power to enforce laws and resolve conflicts.